Underwater archaeological surveys have discovered
amphoras from the
Late Antiquity (4th–6th century) and imported red-polished pottery made in
Constantinople,
Syria and
North Africa, which indicates prospering trade in the area at the time. The city's southern peninsula has remains of a medieval fortress. The town was first mentioned as
Vasiliko by the 12th-century
Arab geographer
Muhammad al-Idrisi. Whether it existed during the
First Bulgarian Empire is unknown. In the 15th and 16th century,
Vasilikoz was an
Ottoman port. According to 17th-century traveller
Evliya Çelebi, in 1662 the town
Vasilikoz Burgas comprised a square fortress on a ridge overlooking the
Black Sea surrounded by plenty of vineyards. Although its cove was suitable even for the largest of ships, it was usually avoided by the seamen because it offered little protection from the powerful eastern winds. Vasilikoz was featured in the Ottoman tax registers in the late 17th and the 18th century, as part of the
kaza of Anchialos (
Pomorie). According to the
Austrian ambassador in Constantinople, in 1787 it was a town of 200 houses and a lively port. In 1829, another western traveller mentioned Vasiliko as a town of 220 houses, the main occupation of its residents being ship building and fishing. Another source lists its population in 1831 as 1,800 (with 434 houses). The old town was located in the southern part of the cove, where the modern quarter of Tsarevo called Vasiliko is. In the first half of the 19th century, Vasiliko had a marine of 42 ships. There were 10
windmills and a
watermill in the vicinity, and the nearby vineyards produced up to 6,000 pails of wine a year. There was a Greek school which was also visited by many Bulgarians, contributing to their partial
Hellenization. In 1882, a fire destroyed almost the entire town, forcing the locals to re-establish the city on a new site, on the peninsula of the northern cove called Limnos. In 1903, the new Vasiliko had 150 houses, but other statistics list 460 houses in 1898 (160 Bulgarian and 300 Greek) and 240 Greek-only houses in 1900. Vassiliko was centre of
Ahtabolu kaza in
Kırkkilise sanjak of
Edirne Vilayet between 1878 and 1912 After the village was ceded to Bulgaria in 1913, following the
Balkan Wars, its Greek population moved to
Greece and was replaced by
Bulgarians from
Eastern Thrace. In 1926, Vasiliko had 409 households. After a new wharf was constructed from 1927 to 1937 with the financial aid of Tsar
Boris III of Bulgaria, the town was renamed to
Tsarevo (a literal Bulgarian translation of
Vasiliko, "royal place") in his honour. ==Gallery==